Henderson the Rain King - Saul Bellow [48]
� You had me worried when you started that skull dance, but after a minute of it I would have backed you to my last dime." And I took out my wallet, which I kept taped to the inside of the helmet, and to make these moments easier for him, within the rising blare of the horns and the constant running of the drums (while we sat as if marooned in the illuminated air), I said, "Your Highness, did I ever show you these pictures of my wife and children?" I started to look for them in the bulky wallet. I had my passport there, and four one-thousand-dollar bills, taking no chances on traveler's checks in Africa. "Here's my wife. We spent a lot of money on a portrait and had difficulties all through. I begged her not to hang it and almost had a nervous breakdown over it. But this photograph of her is a beauty." In it Lily wore a low-necked dress of polka dots. She looked very amused. It was toward me that she was smiling, for I was at the camera. She was saying affectionately that I was a fool; I probably had been clowning around. Owing to the smile her cheeks were high and full; in the picture you couldn't tell how pure and pale her color was. The king took it from me, and I have to hand it to him that at a moment like this he could contemplate Lily's picture. "She is a serious person," he said. "Do you think she looks like a doctor's wife?" "I think she looks like any serious person's wife." "But I guess she wouldn't agree about your species idea, Your Highness, because she decided that I was the only fellow in the world she could marry. One God, one husband, I guess. Well, here are the kids �" Without comment he looked at Ricey and Edward, little Alice in Switzerland, the twins. "They are not identical, Your Majesty, but they both cut their first tooth on the same day." The next flap of celluloid held a snapshot of myself; I was in the red robe and hunting cap with the violin under my chin and an expression on my face which I had never noticed before. Quickly I turned to my Purple Heart citation. "Oh? That is so? You are Captain Henderson?" "I didn't keep the commission. Maybe you'd like to see my scars, Your Highness. The thing happened with a land mine. I didn't get the worst of it. I was thrown about twenty feet. Now here in the thigh you can't see it so well, because it's sunken and the hair has grown over and hidden it. The belly wound was the bad one. My insides started to fall out. I held in my guts and walked bent over to the dressing station." "You are very pleased about your trouble, Henderson?" He would always say such things to me and introduce an unforeseen perspective. I have forgotten some of them, but he once asked my opinion about Descartes. "Do you agree with the fellow's proposition that the animal is a soulless machine?" Or, "Do you think that Jesus Christ is still a source of human types, Henderson, as a model-force? I have often thought about my physical types, as the agony, the appetite, and the rest, to be possibly degenerate forms of great originals, as Socrates, Alexander, Moses, Isaiah, Jesus �" This, and the like, was his unforeseen way of conversation. He observed that I was peculiar about trouble and suffering. And, yes, I knew what he was saying as we sat on those poles beside the lavish bristle of the thatch, this grotesque, dry, hairy, piercing vegetable skeleton. As he waited to achieve his heart's desire, he was telling me that suffering was the closest thing to worship that I knew anything about. Believe me, I knew my man, and strange as he was I understood him. I was monstrously proud of my suffering. I thought there was nobody in the world that could suffer quite like me. But we could not speak quietly to each other any more, for the noise was too near. The sounds of cicadas had been going up in vertical spirals, like columns of thinnest shining wire. Now we would hear none of the minor sounds at all. The spearmen behind the hopo lifted up the barred gate to let through the creatures whom the beaters had flushed. For the grasses of the bush were beginning to quiver, as water will when a fish-filled net approaches the surface. "Look there," said Dahfu. He pointed to the cliff side of the hopo, where deer with twisted horns were running; whether they were gazelles or elands I couldn't say. A buck was in the lead. He had tall, twisted horns like smoked glass, and he leaped in terror with blasting breath and huge eyes. On one knee, Dahfu was watching the grass for signs, sighting across his forearm so that his nose was almost covered. The small animals were making currents in the grass. Flocks of birds went straight up, like masses of notes; they flew toward the cliffs and down into the ravine. The deer clattered beneath us. I looked below. Those were planks at the bottom. I hadn't noticed that. They were raised six or eight inches from the ground, and the king said, "Yes. After the capture, Henderson, wheels are put under so the animal can be transported." He stooped low to call instructions to the spearmen. When he bent, I wanted to hold on to him, but I had never touched his person. I wasn't sure it would be right. After the buck and the three does, which squeezed through the narrow opening of the hopo with heart-bursting terror, came a crowd of small beasts; they rushed the opening like immigrants. More cautious, a hyena showed up, and, unlike the other creatures who didn't know we were there, this creature shot a look up at us on the platform and gave its shallow, batlike snarl. I looked for something to throw at it. But there was nothing with us on the platform to throw and I spat down instead. "Lion is there--lion, lion!" The king stood, pointing, and about a hundred yards away, I saw a slow stirring in the grass, not the throbbing of the smaller animals but a circular, heavy disturbance which a powerful body made. "Do you think that would be Gmilo? Hey, hey, hey--is he here? You can take him, King. I know you can." I had risen on the narrow stand of floor projecting from beneath the grass wall, and I was thrusting and cranking my arm up and down as I spoke. "Henderson--do not," he said. Nevertheless I took a step in his direction, and then he cried out at me; his face was angry. So I squatted down and shut my mouth. My blood was full of fever, as if it flowed open to the glare of the sun. The king then set foot on the slender pole and took two turns of the cage rope around his arm and began to release the knot against which he had rested his head during our wait. The cage, with its big irregular meshes of vine and the hooflike stone weights, swung from the more rigid part at the bottom. Except for the rocks the thing had almost no substance; it was as near to being air as a Portuguese man-of-war is to being water. The king had thrown off his hat; it would have got in his way; and about his tight-grown hair, which rose barely an eighth of an inch above his scalp, the blue of the atmosphere seemed to condense, as when you light a few sticks in the woods and about these black sticks the blue begins to wrinkle. The sunlight deformed my face with strain, for I was exposed to it as I hung over the end of the hopo like a gargoyle. The light was hard enough then to leave bruises. And still, in spite of the blasts of the beaters, the cicadas were drilling away, sending up those spirals of theirs. On the cliff side of the hopo the rock was showing its character. It muttered it would let nothing through. All things must wait for it. The small blossoms of the cactus in the ravine, if they were blossoms and not berries, foamed red, and the spines pierced me. Things seemed to speak to me. I inquired in silence about the safety of the king who had a crazy idea that he must capture lions. But I got no reply. This was not the purpose of their speech. They only declared themselves, each according to its law, declaring what it was; nothing at all referred to the king. So I crouched there, sick with heat and dread. My feeling about him had crowded aside everything else within me, which put some pressure on the neighboring organs. With banging and with horn blasts and whooping and screams, the beaters came on, the ones at the rear leaping up from the grass, which was shoulder high, and blowing depraved notes on those horns of green and russet metal. Shots were fired in the air, maybe with my own scope-sight H and H Magnum. And at the front the spears were stitching and jabbing in disorder. "Did you see that, Mr. Henderson--a mane?" Dahfu leaned forward on the pole, holding the rope, and the rock weights banged together over his head. I couldn't bear to see him balanced there on a mere kite stick, with that fringe of stones clattering and wheeling inches above him on the circular contraption. Any one of them might have stunned him. "King, I can't stand this. Be careful, for Christ's sake. This is no machine to horse around with." It was enough, I told myself, that this noble man had to risk his life on that primitive invention; he didn't have to make the thing more dangerous than it was. However, there may have been no safe way to do it. And then he did look very practiced as he balanced on the narrow shaft. The rock weights circled with spasmodic power at the king's pull. This intricate clumsy rig clattered around and around like a merry-go-round, and the netted shadow wheeled on the ground. For the count of about twenty heartbeats I only partly knew where I was or what was happening. Mainly I kept a fixed watch on the king, ready to hurl myself down if he should fall. Then, at the very doors of consciousness, there was a snarl and I looked down from this straw perch--I was on my knees--into the big, angry, hair-framed face of the lion. It was all wrinkled, contracted; within those wrinkles was the darkness of murder. The lips were drawn away from the gums, and the breath of the animal came over me, hot as oblivion, raw as blood. I started to speak aloud. I said, "Oh my God, whatever You think of me, let me not fall under this butcher shop. Take care of the king. Show him Thy mercy." And to this, as a rider, the thought added itself that this was all mankind needed, to be conditioned into the image of a ferocious animal like the one below. I then tried to tell myself because of the clearness of those enraged eyes that only visions ever got to be so hyper-actual. But it was no vision. The snarling of this animal was indeed the voice of death. And I thought how I had boasted to my dear Lily how I loved reality. "I love it more than you do," I had said. But oh, unreality! Unreality, unreality! That has been my scheme for a troubled but eternal life. But now I was blasted away from this practice by the throat of the lion. His voice was like a blow at the back of my head. The barred door had dropped. Small creatures were still escaping through the gaps in streaks of fur, springing and writhing, frantically coiling. The lion rushed under us and threw his weight against these bars. Was he Gmilo? I had been told that Gmilo's ears had been marked as a cub, before he was released by the Bunam. But of course you had to catch the animal before you could look at his ears. This might well be Gmilo. Behind the barrier the men prodded him with the spears while he fought at the shafts and tried to catch them in his jaws. They were too deft for him. In the front rank forty or fifty spear points feinted and worked toward him, while from the back there flew stones, at which the animal shook his huge face with the yellow corded hair which made his forequarters so huge. His small belly was fringed, and also his forelegs, like a plainsman's buckskins. Compared with this creature Atti was no bigger than a lynx. Balancing on the pole in his slippers, Dahfu released one turn of the rope from his upper arm; the net bucked, and the motion and the clacking of the stones caught the lion's eye. The beaters screamed up at Dahfu, "Yenitu lebah!" Ignoring them, he held fast to the line and turned around the rim of the net, which was now level with his eyes. Stone battered stone as the contraption spun around; the lion rose on his hind legs and threw a blow at these weights. Foremost among the beaters was the white-painted Bunam's man, who darted in and knocked the animal on the cheek with a spear butt. From top to bottom this fellow was clad in his dirty white, like kid leather, his hair covered with the chalky paste. I now felt the weight of the lion against the posts that held up the platform. They were no thicker than stilts and when he hit them they vibrated. I thought the structure was going to crash, and I clutched the floor, for I expected that I might be carried down like a water tower when a freight train jumps the tracks and crashes it to splinters, with a ton of water gushing in the air. Under Dahfu's feet the pole swayed, but he rode out the shock with rope and net. "King, for God's sake!" I wanted to cry. "What have we got into?" Again a thick flock of stones flew forward. Some struck the hopo wall but others found the animal and drove him under the circling weights of that cursed net of vines. God curse all vines and creepers! The king began to sway out as he pushed and maneuvered this bell of knots and stones. I was freed for one moment from my dumbness. My voice returned and I said to him, "King, take it easy. Mind what you're doing." Then a globe arose in my throat, about the size of a darning egg. That I could see was almost the only proof I had that life continued. For a time all else was cut off. The lion, getting up on his back legs, struck again at the dipping net. It was now within reach and he caught his claws in the vines. Before he could pull free the king let fall the trap. The rope streaked down from the pulley, the weights rumbled on the boards like a troop of horses, and the cone fell on the lion's head. I was lying on my belly, with my arm stretched out toward the king, but he came to the edge of the platform unhelped by me and cried, "What do you think! Henderson, what do you think!" The beaters screamed. The lion should have been carried to the ground by the weight of the stones, but he was still standing nearly upright. He was caught on the head, and his forepaws spread out the vines and he fell, fighting. His hindquarters were not caught in the net. The air seemed to grow dark in the pit of the hopo from his roaring. I lay with my hand still extended to the king, but he didn't take it. He was looking downward at the netted face of the lion, the maned belly and armpits, which brought back to me the road north of Salerno and myself being held by the medics and shaved from head to foot for crabs. "Does it look like Gmilo? Your Highness, what's your guess?" I said. I didn't understand the situation one bit. "Oh, it is wrong," the king said. "What's wrong?" He was startled by a realization of something I had so far missed. I was stunned by the roars and screams of the capture, and watched the terrible labor of the legs, and the claws black and yellow which issued like thorns from the great pads of the lion's feet. "You've got him. What the hell. What now?" But now I understood what was the matter, for nobody could approach the animal to examine his ears; he was able to turn beneath the net, and, his hindquarters being free, you couldn't get near him. "Rope his legs, somebody," I yelled. The Bunam was below and signaled upward with his ivory stick. The king pushed off from the edge of the platform and took hold of the rope which had been stopped in the pulley by a knot. The overhead pole was bucking and dancing as he got hold of the frayed tail of the rope. He hauled at it, and the pulley started to scream. The lion was incompletely caught, and the king was going to try to work the net over the animal's hindquarters. I called to him, "King, think it over once. You can't do it. He weighs half a ton, and he's got a solid grip on the net." I didn't realize that only the king could remedy the situation and no one could come between him and the lion, as the lion might be the late King Gmilo. Thus it was entirely up to the king to complete the capture. The pummeling of the drums and the bugling and stone-throwing had stopped, and from the crowd there was only a shout now and then heard when the lion was not roaring. Individual voices were commenting to the king on the situation, which was a bad one. I stood up saying, "King, I'll go down and look at his ear, just tell me what to look for. Hold it, King, hold." But I doubt whether he heard me. His legs were wide apart in the center of the pole, which bowed deeply and swung and swayed under the energetic movement of his legs, and the rope and pulley and the block made cries as if resined, and the stone weights clattered on the planks. The lion fought on his back and the whole construction swayed. Again I thought the entire hopo tower would collapse and I gripped the straw behind me. Then I saw some smoke or dust above the king and realized that this came from the fastenings of hide that held the block of the pulley to the wood. The king's weight and the pull of the lion had been too much for these fastenings. One had torn, that was the puff I saw. And now the other went. "King Dahfu!" I yelled out. He was falling. Block and pulley smashed down on the stone before the fleeing beaters. The king had fallen onto the lion. I saw the convulsion of the animal's hindquarters. The claws tore. Instantly there came blood, before the king could throw himself over. I now hung from the edge of the platform by my fingers, hung and then fell, shouting as I went. I wish this had been the eternal pit. The king had rolled himself from the lion. I pulled him farther away. Through the torn clothing his blood sprang out. "Oh, King! My friend!" I covered up my face. The king said, "Wo, Sungo." The surfaces of his eyes were strange. They had thickened. I took off my green trousers to tie up the wound. These were all I had to hand, and they did no good but were instantly soaked. "Help him! Help!" I said to the crowd. "I did not make it, Henderson," the king said to me. "Why, King, what are you talking about? We'll carry you back to the palace. We'll put some sulfa powder into this and stitch you up. You'll tell me what to do, Your Majesty, being the doctor of us two." "No, no, they will never take me back. Is it Gmilo?" I ran and caught the rope and pulley and threw the wooden block like a bolo at the still thrusting legs; I wound the rope around them a dozen times, almost tearing the skin from them and yelling, "You devil! Curse you, you son of a bitch!" He raged back through the net. The Bunam then came and looked at the ears. He reached back and called authoritatively for something. His man in the dirty white paint handed him a musket and he put the muzzle against the lion's temple. When he fired the explosion tore part of the creature's head away. "It was not Gmilo," the king said. He was glad his blood would not be on his father's head. "Henderson," he said, "you will see no harm comes to Atti." "Hell, Your Highness, you're still king, you'll take care of her yourself." I began to cry. "No, no, Henderson," he said. "I cannot be